Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and wonderful 2017! I hope you all had wonderful holidays, and that the return to “ordinary time” hasn’t been too traumatic.

My holidays were wonderful. Nice time with family, a fun New Year’s Eve party in San Francisco, and then of course the obligatory week laid out with the nasty post-holiday bug that seems to have felled so many this season.

But the little “holiday” story I want to tell today happened during the holidays, but it wasn’t particularly festive. In fact, it could have ruined a lot of people’s entire season.

You may have seen one of the many stories or consumer alerts about wire fraud in the news lately. It’s on the rise. I know that because I’ve seen the stories, too.

I also know it because it happened to my clients. Well, it would have happened, if they hadn’t had an alert team looking out for them.

A few days before closing on this particular transaction, the title representative receive an email from me, telling her that my clients were changing the account that they wanted their proceeds wired to — proceeds totaling nearly $100,000. The new routing and account numbers were included in the email.

Only one problem. I didn’t write the email. It looked like it was from me. It said it was from me. It was signed by “me.” But it wasn’t me.

My clients knew nothing about it, and not instructed anybody to wire to a different account. Certainly not the account listed in the email, which was not theirs, and most likely located somewhere offshore.

Fortunately, I work with the best title rep in the business. I chose her specifically because she takes her job seriously, she is detail-oriented, and she goes above and beyond to make sure everything goes right when my listings close.

We have been working together for years. She knows me, and she knows how I operate. Even thought the email itself looked authentic, she has never known me to change wiring instructions in an email before. And so she called me.

Thank God. Literally.

If we had been working with a title closer who wasn’t as attentive as mine, those funds could easily have been gone. That money was going to be the down payment on their new house. It was basically all the money they had in the world. And once it hit that offshore account, there would be no getting it back.

My clients’ old house would have been sold, the profit they made would have been gone, and the would have no money to make the downpayment on their new house. They would have been left broke and homeless.

I don’t know how these scammers hacked into the transaction. I don’t think they got into my email, because the email address on the fake email wasn’t my real address. Could have been any one of many different entry points — a real estate transaction has a lot of moving parts. These scammers are smart, and they’re getting sneakier every day.

So, in the immortal words of Hill Street Blues, “Be careful out there.” If you are involved in any transaction that involves the transfer of large amounts of money — and particularly if the funds are being wired — double and triple check everything.

And if you’re buying or selling a house, let me and my team make sure you’re protected.

Mary Beth Loves Denver

The local scoop from Mary Beth Bonacci

Well, there is good news and bad news in this crazy Denver real estate market.

The good news is that, in July, inventory increased by just over 4%. The bad news is that, even with that increase, July inventory still set a record low, with only 7352 total properties on the market.

That is not a lot of houses.

What does this mean? It means there are a lot more buyers than there are homes to sell them. And so, especially in the lower price points, good listings get multiple offers, one winner, and several disappointed “losers.”

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and wonderful 2017! I hope you all had wonderful holidays, and that the return to “ordinary time” hasn’t been too traumatic.

My holidays were wonderful. Nice time with family, a fun New Year’s Eve party in San Francisco, and then of course the obligatory week laid out with the nasty post-holiday bug that seems to have felled so many this season.

But the little “holiday” story I want to tell today happened during the holidays, but it wasn’t particularly festive. In fact, it could have ruined a lot of people’s entire season.

I bought my house on Friday. Again. I have owned it for eleven years this month. And I have refinanced, by my count, five times.

Why? Because I want to pay it off. I want to be that cash buyer who goes to the head of the multiple bids. I want to bypass that mortgage payment every month, and write a nice check to some deserving charity instead.

If you are one of my Facebook friends, you saw a stream of prayer request posts from me last month. I had clients who were in a very complicated situation. I didn’t go into detail on Facebook, and I won’t here, but basically title issues were threatening to cause them to lose their house to foreclosure before we could close it with our buyers. The situation consumed me for well over a month. I literally spent every day looking for new solutions — and pushing forward with the multiple potential solutions we were working on. Which we eventually did — at the 11th hour— thanks to a whole lot of work, a lot of thinking outside the box, and more than a few prayers.

So imagine my displeasure when, a few weeks later, I heard a radio commercial for a “discount” real estate company that said “Most houses sell within a couple of days. Why pay an agent 6% for just a few days work?”

Somewhere in Las Vegas tonight, there is a stage with a trophy with my name on it, that I am not there to claim.

After 11 years in the business, I am being inducted into the RE/MAX Hall of Fame. It’s one of those achievement awards that RE/MAX agents work a lifetime to attain. I hadn’t been tracking my production closely, and I honestly thought I was a good two years away from achieving it. But the lovely people at RE/MAX International surprised me with the news last month.

And of course I’m sharing the news with you, because I’m excited about it. And because it’s what we agents are supposed to do.

So here I am at 35,000 feet, watching a People's Court marathon on my iPad. Things have sure changed from the days of my full-time travel. Back in my day, we had nothing but bad food and in-flight magazines to keep us occupied. But now, thanks to the miracles of modern internet technology, I can watch a parade of disaffected roommates and former lovers hash out their differences on national television.

The last case caught my attention, though -- enough to motivate me to turn off the streaming and start writing.

It was the case of a young couple who were new homeowners. After they bought the house, they discovered that the fireplace was in dangerous condition and needed extensive work. The couple were irate. The sellers had told them the fireplace was fine. And instead it was very not-fine. They had children -- children -- living in a house with a dangerous fireplace. Someone had to pay.